Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht; was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.
An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble — the post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife, long-time collaborator and actress Helene Weigel.
Background
Bertolt Brecht was born on February 10, 1898, in the medieval city of Augsburg, part of the Bavarian section of the German Empire. Married in 1897, his father was a Catholic and his mother a Protestant. Brecht was their first child, baptized as Eugen Bertolt Friedrich Brecht. His father, Bertolt Friedrich Brecht, worked in a paper factory. His mother, Wilhelmine Friederike Sophie Brezing, was ill with breast cancer most of his young life. He had one brother, Walter, who was born in 1900.
Much of his work, including twelve hundred poems, was still unpublished; of twenty-one major plays seven had not been professionally acted in German. It was plain, however, that he was a writer of the first importance. He was above all a poet with a great mastery of styles and forms, who endowed his mature work with a forceful simplicity that is rare in German and was partly based on English models. This verbal strength and energy is a main feature of his plays. They may be unreal in setting and slack in construction, but they are always poetic and (after 1926) often humorous, ironical, and down-to-earth. The works with Weill are sharp satires, influenced by jazz and the cabaret song; the Lehrstücke, based on the Japanese nkno drama, are detached and judicial; the big plays of 1938-1948 have the sprawling narrative richness of the Shakespearean "history," a loose "epic" form that Brecht always admired.
In notes on the plays and in essays he worked out a whole theory of theatrical aesthetics. This theory largely rejects empathy, suspense, and plot in order to make the spectator aware of the actor's artificiality, and so of the real world in which they both live, and its shortcomings. But his principles of "alienation" and "epic theater" played surprisingly little part in his direction of his own company, which apart from a few personal quirks was mainly remarkable for coherence of approach and perfection of detail. His real achievement lay in kneading all elements of his theater--words, music, story, setting, direction, and theory--into a whole where everything related to his Marxist, plebeian, antimilitarist view of the world, and his wish to communicate this view clearly and entertainingly to his audience. Because his methods often ran against the official Communist aesthetic of Socialist Realism he was a figure of controversy in Eastern Europe as well as the W.
He believed in communal effort, working unusually closely with his composers and with a team of whom the chief members were Elisabeth Hauptmann (literary), Caspar Neher (scenery), and Erich Engel (production). His models, whom he pillaged freely, included FrançoisFrancois Villon, the Japanese actor-author Seami, Shakespeare, Grimmelshausen, George Büchner,Buchner, John Gay, Arthur Rimbaud, Rudyard Kipling, Jaroslav Hašek,Hasek, and Arthur Waley; and his work at times parallels Paul Claudel's. But the joint result always bore Brecht's individual stamp.
Education
Brecht was a sickly child, having a congenital heart condition and a facial tic. As a result, he was sent to a sanitarium to relax. At age six he attended a Protestant elementary school (Volksschule) and at age ten a private school, The Royal Bavarian Realgymnasium (Koeniglich-Bayerisches Realgymnasium). Like most students, he was educated in Latin and the humanities, later being exposed to Nietzsche and other thinkers. He suffered a heart attack at the age of twelve but soon recovered and continued his education.
When he was 16, the First World War broke out. Initially enthusiastic, Brecht soon changed his mind on seeing his classmates "swallowed by the army". On his father's recommendation, Brecht sought a loophole by registering for an additional medical course at Munich University, where he enrolled in 1917. There he studied drama with Arthur Kutscher, who inspired in the young Brecht an admiration for the iconoclastic dramatist and cabaret-star Wedekind.
Career
Bertolt Brecht was one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century. His works include The Threepenny Opera (1928) with composer Kurt Weill, Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), The Good Person of Szechwan (1943), and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1958).
On Feb. 28, 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, Brecht left Germany and settled in Denmark. His works could not be played or published in Germany; in 1935 he was deprived of his German citizenship. He wrote poems and sketches for the anti-Nazi movement, and between 1938 and 1941 wrote four of his biggest plays, which the Zürich Schauspielhaus later produced.
: Leben des Galilei (Galileo), Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children), Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (The Good Woman of Setzuan), and Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (Herr Puntila and his Man Matti). In 1940 the Nazi invasion of Denmark drove him into Sweden, then to Finland; in 1941 he crossed the U.S.S.R. to settle in the United States. Here he wrote Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle), produced by the Berliner Ensemble in 1954, and two other plays, and worked on an English version of Galileo which was staged in 1947.
He left America in November 1947 for Zürich,Zurich, where he wrote his chief theoretical work, the Kleines Organon, and his last complete major play, Die Tage der Commune ("The Days of the Commune"). In October 1948 he went to the Soviet sector of Berlin and on Jan. 11, 1949, staged Mother Courage there, with his wife Helene Weigel in the title part. This led to the forming of their own company, the Berliner Ensemble, for which he adapted or directed some twelve plays. It toured Poland in the winter of 1952-1953 and played at the Paris Theater Festivals of 1954-1955, and 1960. It became an East German state theater in March 1954.
Brecht was always a subject for dispute, especially in the split Germany of his last years. In March 1951 his opera Die Verurteilung des Lukullus (The Condemnation of Lucullus), with a score by Paul Dessau, was withdrawn for revision on Communist party orders; in June 1953 after the East German riots, he was quoted as expressing loyalty to the regime, and many West German theaters boycotted his works.
Religion
Thanks to his mother's influence, Brecht knew the Bible, a familiarity that would have a lifelong effect on his writing.
Politics
During the war years, Brecht became a prominent writer of the Exilliteratur. He expressed his opposition to the National Socialist and Fascist movements in his most famous plays: Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, and many others.
Views
From his late twenties Brecht remained a lifelong committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his "epic theatre", synthesized and extended the experiments of Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism.